itive dislike to the negroes.

An evidence of the contagious character of cruelty was given in a
circumstance coming under the author's observation on a certain
plantation at Alquizar, where a manifest piece of severity led him to
appeal to the proprietor in behalf of a female slave. The request for
mercy was promptly granted, and the acting overseer, himself a
mulatto, was quietly reprimanded for his cruelty. "You will find,"
said our host, "that colored men always make the hardest masters when
placed over their own race, but they have heretofore been much
employed on the island in this capacity, because a sense of pride
makes them faithful to the proprietor's interest. That man is himself
a slave," he added, pointing to the sub-overseer, who still stood
among the negroes, whip in hand.

The Montero sometimes hires a free colored man to help him in the
planting season on his little patch of vegetable garden, in such work
as a Yankee would do for himself, but these small farmers trust mostly
to the exuberant fertility of the soil, and spare themselves all
manual labor, save that of gathering the produce and taking it to
market. They form, nevertheless, a very important and interesting
class of the population. They marry very young, the girls at thirteen
and fifteen, the young men from sixteen to eighteen, and almost
invariably rear large families. Pineapples and children are a
remarkably sure crop in the tropics. The increase among them during
the last half century has been very large, much more in proportion
than in any other class of the community, and they seem to be
approaching a degree of importance, at least numerically, which will
render them eventually like the American farmers, the bone and sinew
of the land. There is room enough for them and to spare, for hardly
more than one tenth of the land is under actual cultivation, a vast
portion being still covered by virgin forests and uncleared savannas.
The great and glaring misfortune--next to that of living under a
government permitting neither civil nor religious liberty, where
church and state are alike debased as the tools of despotism,--is
their want of educational facilities. Books and schools they have
none. Barbarism itself is scarcely less cultured. We were told that
the people had of late been somewhat aroused from this condition of
lethargy concerning education, and some effort has recently been made
among the more intelligent to afford their children